London riots: why Spiro Agnew offers Boris Johnson a way through this crisis

Sprio Agnew used popular backlash against urban disorder to launch a national career

Boris Johnson has finally returned home, 72 hours too late. His decision to go on doing whatever it is he does on holiday (I’m imagining a drunken game of Buckaroo) while London burns has risked making him look aloof and disinterested. But all is not lost: there’s still time to turn this around. In 1968, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew converted a similar disaster into a vote winner and catapulted himself to the Vice Presidency. Conservatives everywhere should take note.

On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin. Three days later rioting broke out in Baltimore, Maryland. It was expected that the state’s governor, Republican Spiro Agnew, would respond with the established pattern of regret, sympathy and a call for urban aid. Agnew was a moderate Republican who had beaten a segregationist Democrat in his race for the statehouse. When he called Baltimore’s Civil Rights leaders to a meeting at the city’s State Office Building, they thought it was for the standard “heart-to-heart”. Instead Agnew (who was accompanied by a police chief brandishing a riding crop) denounced the riots as an “insurrection” and attacked “the caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type” who had taken part. He called the Civil Rights leaders cowards for failing to denounce the violence, causing two-thirds of them to march out the room. Liberal commentators thought Agnew had gone mad and predicted the end of his career. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, was so impressed with his performance that he put him on his ticket for the November elections. The victory of Nixon-Agnew in 1968 capped one of the most startling ascendancies in American political history.

Agnew, alas, turned out to be a crook. Five years later, he pleaded “no contest” to bribery charges and quit the Vice-Presidency. After that, he went a little loco and wrote a book claiming Nixon had planned to have him assassinated. But Agnew did two things in April 1968 that helped redefine the political landscape for the 1970s.

First, he offered a strong, bullish defence of the moderate black and white citizens who had suffered during the riots. It was the fashion back then to treat civil disobedience as part of some grand historical narrative – the angry expression of an oppressed people. That’s the line that Ken Livingstone flirted with when he associated the Tottenham riots with government spending cuts. Agnew did what Johnson must now do: cut through the sociological babble and call the violence wanton criminality. He recognised that a backlash was growing against urban anarchy by people who were paying their taxes and obeying the law but, somehow, always seemed to end up getting blamed for the theft and murder that other people committed.

Second, Agnew moved the onus of blame for the riots away from poverty and towards the culture of victimhood fostered by 1960s liberals. His attack on the Civil Rights leadership was particularly hurtful coming just days after King’s death. But his implicit thesis – that liberalism had locked whole classes out of Capitalism and out of politics by encouraging them to think and act as impotent victims – caught the mood of a public that felt it had bent over backwards to heal the injustices of the past. Likewise, contemporary Londoners will not swallow claims that the riots were the fault of racist police officers or the coalition government. They are more likely to resent the kind of politician who has encouraged this sort of anarchy through decades of fostering class and racial animosity.

That old devil, Spiro Agnew, understood that in a moment of social crisis there’s always a backlash among the stunned majority waiting to be tapped. Historians and political scientists have long wondered why an oaf like Agnew was elevated so suddenly to the Vice Presidency in 1968, and have generally concluded that it was down to popular racism. But the experience of the last few days screams for a comparative conservative response that has not yet been offered. David Lammy came close with his impressive, painful eulogy for a destroyed Tottenham. Johnson could go further. If he can use his mix of eccentricity and frankness to make a far more blunt case that (1) the silent majority have nothing to feel guilty for, (2) the rioters are opportunistic criminals and (3) the police have done the best they can, then he can set himself at the head of a national constituency of bewildered, put-upon voters.